As one of the world’s leading educational and research institutions, Johns Hopkins has an ever-expanding need to mine, store, and disseminate massive amounts of information.

This year, the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) expanded into a university-wide initiative. It now serves as the center of the university’s data analytics efforts, promoting education and research in the application of data-intensive technologies to a diversity of problems.

IDIES is led by an executive committee consisting of faculty and staff and has a membership of more than 80 affiliated faculty from 28 departments across the university in areas ranging from astrophysics and genetics to fluid mechanics and environmental science. The institute will be a curator and incubator of massive data sets, a hub for expanded undergraduate and graduate opportunities, a convener of the latest in research on the science of big data, and a patron and funder of the next generation of insights through data.

IDIES serves as the center of the university’s data analytics efforts, promoting education and research in the application of data-intensive technologies to a diversity of problems.

The university will house this data in the Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center, a new high-performance research computing facility to open soon at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in East Baltimore. Funded entirely by the state of Maryland, the university will co-manage this $30 million state-of-the-art facility with the University of Maryland. The center will provide some 20 petabytes of storage and eventually quadruple in size.

Together, IDIES and MARCC offer a chance to harness data to unlock some of the most elusive mysteries of our time: deciphering genomes, predicting electrical grid outages, treating seemingly incurable cancers, and mapping the history of the universe.